The Community Council has made a call for feedback on the Code of Conduct v2, which will be discussed at their next meeting on October 4th, 2012. You can send feedback to czajkowski AT ubuntu DOT com to get it added to the ideas wiki page.

George Chirstofis of the Greek Ubuntu community shares that they have created an Ubuntu 12.10 countdown banner. Christofis gives detailed instructions on how to download the banner, adjust it to your desired language, and integrate it into a website.

Jeffery Elkner of the Washington DC LoCo and SugarLabs DC shares an article outlining the process he used to review and finally select Xubuntu 12.04 with Sweets Distribution repositories and "sweets-desktop" package for 30 laptops which will be used to start a program for elementary students in Senegal.

Laura Czajkowski of Launchpad reports that Parallel Testing is complete and that WebOps have finished parallel testing in buildbot. Czajkowski points out that if some problems occur during the parallel testing usage, people should visit following links for help:

Richard Harding of Launchpad informs us that "Launchpad has moved from YUI 3.3.0 to 3.5.1 and is now served by the combo loader. This change provides a faster experience for users along with easier maintenance and new JavaScript library features for developers."

Matthew Revell of Launchpad shares that "on the 5th of October they'll be ending their beta of Mercurial imports in Launchpad. On that day existing Mercurial imports will cease and there won't be any possibility to create new ones." However, Revell points out that "this doesn't affect Bazaar, Git, Subversion or CVS imports." The reason for Mercurial ending is because of low usage and low quality.

Jorge Castro discusses how Ubuntu's cloud team, together with Summit OSS maintainer Chris Johnston, hosted, deployed, and managed the Linux plumbers conference schedule via juju.
Since Castro and his team are "generalizing this work into a more generic Django charm," anyone interested can contact Castro. Help is not required just with Django but with "Pyramid, nodejs, Rails and $your_favorite_web_platform" as well.

Victor Tuson Palau continues his blog series demonstrating how Ubuntu is the best environment to write up "connected" or "cloud backend" Android Apps using Juju with a blog post titled "How to test if it all works in a production environment?"

The Xubuntu team announces that offline documentation has been refreshed for the 12.10 cycle. Included among the changes are restructured content, updated documentation to reflect new default applications, and completely rewritten sections.

Jono Bacon responds to some of the concerns about user privacy that have arisen since the inclusion of the ability for the Dash to search external sources for results. After speaking with John Lenton, Senior Engineering Manager, Jono reassures users that no user-identifiable data is retrieved during the search, and that Canonical does not perform any kind of user tracking. They also touched upon concerns about the searches being unencrypted, saying "we are currently working to encrypt these dash searches ready for the release of this feature in Ubuntu 12.10."

In a later post, Bacon re-enforces that the shopping lens is still under development and testing, and that there will be an option to easily disable it.

Charlene Tessier writes about problems around Ubuntu usage and adoption, and criticism by existing users about recent changes to the operating system, speculating that 99% of people don't know what Ubuntu is or what it is for. We want to reach all of these other people, so Tessier thinks that a solution for the adoption problem is to go out on the street and talk with people who haven't used Ubuntu yet to see what they like and prefer.

Stephane Graber introduces the python LXC API that makes it easy for developers to work with the LXC library. The goal is to make it accessible from other languages with some bindings. Graber also discusses how the initial implementation of the API has been pushed to the LXC staging branch on github and into the LXC package of Ubuntu 12.10.

Jono Bacon announces the release of Ubuntu Accomplishments 0.3. This update focuses on bringing improvements in quality. Notable new features are: an improved My Trophies section, new filters, and social media integration. There has also been a lot of work during this version cycle in creating a web gallery that will, in the future, allow trophies to be viewed or shared online.

Barneedhar reports on the generally favorable feedback for Ask Ubuntu from an interview with Marco Ceppi, one of the community moderators, by Mark Johnson for OSS Watch. He also shares a note on the updated list of the top five contributors in September, the hottest questions of the month, and more.

Maia Grotepass shares details about her work on the Free Particle Digital art exhibition, and highlights Anne Roquigny's portion of a webjay performance with 6 other artists. Grotepass writes "in previous collaborations I find myself having to span multiple operating systems each with their own idiosyncrasies. This time, to my delight, Anne's entire system runs on ubuntu."

A private beta will be available in October for 1,000 users to test Steam for Linux. The initial beta will include a test of the service itself as well as one game and will work on computers running Ubuntu 12.04 and above.

Michael Larabel of Phoronix brings us "benchmarks of ALUSA's Intel Atom Desktop that packs an Intel Atom D525 processor with Intel GMA 3150 graphics, 2GB of RAM, and a 500GB SATA disk. The benchmarks are from Ubuntu 10.10, Ubuntu 12.04.1 LTS, and an Ubuntu 12.10 development snapshot to see how the performance has evolved since this Intel Atom CPU was introduced two years ago."

Joey Sneddon of OMG! Ubuntu! leads us through the process that the Ubuntu shopping lens went through to get an "off switch" for the results; from the first remarks from a Unity developer, to code and appearance of this and other elements of the Dash, Lenses, and Scopes.

Dave Delony of Make Tech Easier calls musicians, audio engineers, and other "creative" people to use Ubuntu Studio, a "customized Ubuntu version geared for creative work: audio, video and graphics" and reviews some of the key applications.

Joey Sneddon of OMG! Ubuntu! writes about Ubuntu's Sync Menu, and the possibilities with Ubuntu One and indicators. Sneddon writes: "Designed to be a one-stop drop-down menu for both mounting the status of, and controlling, downloads, the Sync Menu has the potential to make life that little bit easier."

Veronica Henry of ReadWriteWeb shares an interview with Ubuntu Women, Elizabeth Krumbach, and Cheri Francis. Henry points out that Ubuntu Women is a "non political organization, so you'll find no mentions of feminism but rather a safe place where women, curious about the Ubuntu developer community can come and ask questions without fear of intimidation or condescension." Henry also highlights crucial parts of the Ubuntu Women organization such as mentoring, contributions, and education.

Henry points out that, as in any part of the Ubuntu project, people are welcome to join Ubuntu Women as well. They can do that by "contacting anyone on the leadership team (wiki.ubuntu-women.org/Contacts ) or check out the #ubuntu-women and #ubuntu-women-project IRC channels."

Christoper Tozzi of The Var Guy brings us highlights of what we can expect on the Ubuntu server side: "latest release of OpenStack known as Folsom, cloud-init support for config drive v2, cloud images of Ubuntu Server 12.10 will be available for the armhf architecture, 0.48.1 of Ceph the distributed data storage system, packages for floodlight and mininet, Version 7 of the Apache Tomcat Java platform."

Andrew of WebUpd8 leads us through a Unity WebApps tour pointing out possibilities such as "tight desktop integration for popular websites like Gmail, Google Plus, Last.fm radio, Facebook, Google Docs and many others." Andrew also made a little tutorial about how to install WebApps via the terminal.

John Gold of Network World brings us thoughts from different people in the open source world regarding VMWare joining the OpenStack. Gold specifically highlights the thoughts of Canonical's cloud vice president, Kyle McDonald: "This isn't something new to us, this isn't something we don't understand, this isn't a community we're going to seek to control of - we've already been in the OpenStack world, we've already been developing a product."

Stephen Michael Kellat brings us news, among other things, about the Amazon shopping experience under Ubuntu, and mass market needs. The question is raised whether to be proactive in announcing a feature or being reactive when somebody else says something about it. Most simply put: Is anybody responsible for communicating to the non-developer mass market about these sorts of features prior to their incorporation?

The Ubuntu community consists of individuals and teams, working on different aspects of the distribution, giving advice and technical support, and helping to promote Ubuntu to a wider audience. No contribution is too small, and anyone can help. It's your chance to get in on all the community fun associated with developing and promoting Ubuntu. http://www.ubuntu.com/community/participate